Ida Scudder

Ida Scudder was born in 1870 at Ranipet in south India, the third generation of a family of American medical missionaries, and wanted no part of it. She had seen the famine, the illness and her mother's exhaustion, and after school in Massachusetts she intended to marry well and stay in the United States.

In 1890 she went back briefly to nurse her mother. One evening, by her own account, three men came to the bungalow in turn, a Hindu, a Muslim and another high-caste Hindu, each asking her to attend his young wife in a difficult labour. She had no training and offered her father; each refused to let a man see his wife. In the morning she learned all three women had died. She decided that night to become a doctor.

She qualified at Cornell in 1899, in the first class there to admit women, and in 1900 opened a clinic in Vellore with one bed in her father's house. A forty-bed hospital followed in 1902, paid for by a donor in New York, and she started roadside dispensaries, driving out to villages and treating patients under trees. In 1918 she opened a medical school for women, at a time when almost nobody believed Indian women would enrol; the first year drew more than a hundred applicants for fourteen places.

The Christian Medical College became coeducational in 1947 and one of the leading hospitals in Asia. She retired to the hills at Kodaikanal and died there in 1960.